Strangers share Christmas dinner in a Copenhagen restaurant. “You hope you don’t look too much like a lonely old guy … There are good astri over this night, and the ruby is the most powerful gem in the universe.” Thomas E. Kennedy is an American expat who has lived in Copenhagen for more than thirty...

Yehuda Amichai’s poem “We Did It” is among his best-known; it inspired Stuart Dybek’s wonderful and much-anthologized story “We Didn’t.” In Broad Street’s debut, Robert Alter, the renowned translator of Hebrew literature (including several books of the Bible), discusses how he worked to sharpen the language to more closely hew to Amichai’s meaning. Compare Alter’s...

Finally Rick struck a match by a gravestone and yelled, “They’re here!” Jim and I converged on the modest, waist-high headstone, streaked dark with tree sap or mold, that Rick was kneeling beside. In his matchlight the inscription was clear: “Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald . . . His Wife . . . Zelda Sayre.” Things went glimmering, and each of us,...

Intriguing facts about the great author revealed in David S. Brown’s new book on FSF … Everyone knows F. Scott Fitzgerald. He is variously remembered as the “Great American Dreamer,” the author of The Great Gatsby, and the man who coined the phrase “Jazz Age.” Fitzgerald was a literary celebrity in that dubious industry’s infancy...